Thursday, April 26, 2012

A taxonomy of confusion

Axel Nennker pointed out on Twitter an OpenID implementation between Amazon & MyHabit.com.

A screenshot of the login page

My first reaction was that this was an example of the password anti-pattern, ie the user is being asked by MyHabit.com to present their Amazon credentials. 

Axel pointed out to me that this was actually an Amazon page and not a MyHabit page, but branded to look like a MyHabit page - in Axel's words

So it's not password anti-pattern, because MyHabit never sees the user's credentials.

But it is, to my mind, misleading, because the MyHabit branded login page may make it feel to a user like they are presenting their Amazon password to MyHabit. 

It's not password anti-pattern, its the 'anti password anti-pattern'.

A taxonomy is called for